Along with many others, I’m watching what happens at Michaela School, the new Free school in Brent, north west London, with a great deal of interest. The school led by Katherine Birbalsingh is into its second academic year and it is attracting a lot of attention, not least because of its self-promotion, its tweeting teachers and its swaggering, come-and-have-a-go-if-you-think-you-are-hard-enough approach to education.

I was going to reply directly to a post by Katie Ashford, Assistant Head at Michaela, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was. Having been thinking about the ongoing investigation into the “London Schools” effect, I thought I’d join the two together to see if I could make four.

In summary, Katie suggests that there is an ongoing “catastrophic failure” on the part of some London primary schools. These schools have failed to “do their job”. This has led to children who are not able to read joining Michaela, where - through the work done at the school over the last 18 months – non-readers been enabled to read “thousands of words per day.”
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This is interesting on many levels, not least because Michaela School is in London. As we keep being told, London is a huge educational success story with a huge change in the achievement of its school-age children over the past fifteen years or so. Whilst many have argued why this might have happened, it is certainly true that the capital’s children do well at school when compared to children elsewhere in the country*. So why would Michaela’s students have been let down so badly by their - London-based - feeder primaries?

London’s success begins early in primary school

The reports into the London Effect have suggested that the biggest change has not been at secondary level. It turns out that the London Challenge, Teach First and various other initiatives – largely focused on 11-18 education between 2005 and 2015 – have not been the driving factor in children’s improved educational outcomes within the M25. In fact, it appears that much of the improvement at 16 can be traced to improvements in prior attainment of children entering secondary schools in the Capital.

The latest report on the London Effect identifies the change between the age of five and seven as the key difference. It would appear that many children in the capital start school with relatively limited English, and proceed to make good progress throughout Primary school and beyond.

Who attends Michaela?

Brent, where Michaela is based, has a significant ‘ethnic’ population (i.e. those who identified themselves as not ‘British white’ or ‘Irish’ on the 2011 census). Almost two in every three people identifies as Black, Asian or minority ethic, as compared to just 14% of people in England and Wales as a whole. Just over 20% of households have no English speakers, with around one in six households have some non-English speaking adults at homeꭞ (see page 11 here).

In addition to this, over half of the people who live in Brent were born outside the UK, and around 30% of residents hold non-UK passports. Residents are diverse, with sizable populations who identify as Black African, Arab, Polish, Black Carribean, British Indian and Indian amongst others.

Michaela’s children are therefore a very mixed group, with multiple different paths into education and school.

How do Michaela’s children get on in school?

Michaela, being a very new, has little or no publically available data. Its nearest neighbour is Ark Academy, which had 55 pupils in Key Stage 2 in 2015. Of these children, none were assessed by their teachers to be at Level 3 for reading, maths and writing. Just two (4% in total) of the school’s Year 6 children were assessed at Level 3 by the KS2 external Reading SAT, with 49 (89%) assessed at Level 4B plus. Reading ‘Value Added’ was just less than 100 (98.2 with a confidence interval of 97.6 to 98.8). Whilst these numbers are fuzzy, they suggest that children reached a good level from a low start, exactly as predicted by the Blanden et al study.

With little else to go on, it would be reasonable to suggest that children in Michael’s part of Brent are likely to be similar to Ark Academy. Some will have limited support in English, and therefore reading in English, at home, and many children will speak and read in languages other than English within the home, with parents who are likely to be proficient in languages other than English.

It would therefore be reasonable to suggest that many children enter school with relatively limited proficiency in written and spoken English as compared to most children in England and Wales. It would also be reasonable to suggest that, by the time they finish Primary school, many children in Brent (and now attending Michaela) will have worked through early challenging circumstances, and, exactly as Blanden et al predict, be ready to make the excellent gains which children in London schools make through the secondary phase of their education.

Michaela’s approach to reading will almost certainly help the children they teach, and their ambition and effort is to be congratulated. To use their highly unusual circumstance to pour scorn on those who have taught children in the primary phase of their education seems a tad mean-spirited, however. To use the story to suggest that children are 'let down' by teachers who 'don't teach reading properly' seems simplistic in the extreme. There is a positive story to tell - you appear to have helped your students to develop into confident readers through a great deal of hard work. Why not tell that?

ꭞKatie’s post suggests that the family in the anecdotal case she describes do speak English, although there is a suggestion that the frustrated father’s spoken English is not standard English - it’s hard to say whether this is because the family speak other languages outside of school or not, and of course there is no particular reason why Katie should reveal any more than she already has about the family.

Thanks for producing such a detailed review. I found similar in Lambeth and Hackney, with heads telling me about their personalised approaches to learning, due to the identification of individual needs.

I was too annoyed by the content and tone of "Michaela promotion piece" to reply to it at the time, but would add the following points to your critical appraisal:
1. Perhaps I misread the article (in my frustration), but it appears to lambaste both whole word approaches and mixed methods for teaching reading? So presumably their approach is totally phonic? Somewhat perverse for a secondary school, surely! I'd wager that at least 98% of the literate population learned to read via mixed methods. [Totally invented stats there - sorry!]
2. The child referred to had difficulty 'dragging her attention from WhatsApp'. If so, the possibility that she was actually 'unable to read' at that point strikes me as most unlikely.
3. In my vast experience [primary/infant/SEN] over 35 yrs, one of the key triggers that make a difference to children learning to read is the positive impact/motivation/involvement of parents. Children who REALLY struggle are those whose parents opt out of supporting.
4. Over the years I have encountered hundreds of children who have struggled to read for a variety reasons. In some cases prior (limited) methods were probably responsible; but this was often compounded by poor attendance, school-hopping, undiagnosed sight/hearing problems and, frequently, limited knowledge of language and vocabulary. I do recall, however, 2 children who appeared totally unable to learn to read despite all the methods, help and support I could muster.

This school leadership appears to have fallen for the Tory spin that education in general, and reading in particular, is a simple one-size-fits-all process. Oh, if only......

‘Teachers were positive about phonics as an approach to teaching reading, and its contribution towards early reading development. In the majority of schools, however, other strategies alongside phonics were also supported. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/307229/Evaluation_of_the_phonics_screening_check_second_interim_report_FINAL.pdf

It appears, then, that the rise in the proportion of pupils passing the phonics screening test is not due solely to phonics, important though this method is if taught systematically.

Many thanks for this balanced appraisal, which helpfully adduces the wider social-cultural context. Learning to read takes place within this context, and is not simply a matter of teaching technique. Moreover, the ability to read is not a panacea for all social and educational ills, despite the claims of some people who should know better.

Did anyone else notice the style of Tabula Rasa's post was remarkably similar to the one used in Ms Birbalsingh's book 'To Miss With Love'? This describes the day-to-day work of 'Snuffy' who really, really cares about her pupils. These are given names which are supposed to reflect their personality (eg Dumbo, who is one of her 'cabbage kids', Beautiful, who has an abusive boyfriend etc). Snuffy is the only teacher at Ordinary School who is fighting against a broken system.

In Tabula Rasa's post the father is named as Shaun Daniels. Not his real name, of course - it would be unprofessional to write something which could identify a school pupil. But then Birbalsingh has form - it was she who showed a picture of one of her pupils at the Tory Conference in 2010 and mocked him as 'Anger Management' much to the whooped delight of the audience.

The father is portrayed as an oik in a 'sweatshirt covered in splotches of white paint, a pair of old, grey Nike’s' who asked for help in ungrammatical English. And Tabula Rasa portrays herself as the saviour of his Neanderthal daughter who manages to use her phone despite allegedly being illiterate. Perhaps she was just thumping the screen randomly to find pictures.

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Janet Downs

20/1/2016 12:19:05 pm

I left a comment on Tabula Rasa's thread after she recommended a reader look at Cuckoo Hall Academy for inspiration. I asked if this was the same Cuckoo Hall Academy which was under a Financial Notice to Improve, where KS2 results a couple of years ago were the lowest in Enfield and where this year the results are about 7% points lower than the national average. Funnily enough, my comment hasn't appeared.

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Me?
I work in primary education and have done for ten years. I also have children
in primary school. I love teaching, but I think that school is a thin layer of icing on top of a very big cake, and that the misunderstanding of test scores is killing the love of teaching and learning.